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Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and larger, higher resolution displays. However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn't kept up. There are a few major battery suppliers but Sony is currently an underdog, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors — Samsung (SDI), Panasonic and LG Chem — each command around 20 percent of the market. In an effort to change that, Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony's batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times. The company is now working to ensure that the new battery chemistry is safe enough for commercial use.
Let me know when there are factories building these batteries, until then, *yawn*
ain't nobody's hero
"Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times
If the headline is true, ie 40% more capacity, isn't "smaller batteries can maintain the same run time" pretty much a given?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Energy density is not all that matters, and even energy density is *complicated.* One can have high energy density if one looks at maximum energy per mass, or per volume, and depending on the application and how different they are one or the other can matter, which is why tables generally include both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials . But even aside from energy density one has other issues, like recharge time and lifespan. It doesn't matter if you can make a battery with very high energy density but with a very short lifespan. In general, I'm skeptical of claims of massive improvement in batteries. As with new solar systems, if every single in-lab claimed battery improvement all were genuine and implementable we'd have solves all the world's energy problems years ago.
Battery research is far more important than building smaller phones and tablets. Increased energy storage density has important implications for household and grid storage, and electric-powered transport.
The problem is that there have been at least a dozen or so stories about new battery tech in the past 12 months. Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away. Enough crying wolf; wake me when I can buy one.
Another battery story that will just be forgotten, along with so many that's come before it
Li-Ion batteries already go up in nice flames. Consider what you would get with 40% more energy and sulphur getting burned off into the air.
I'm creating a battery that uses air and common garden dirt to produce 200% more power in a cell that is 46.7% smaller than a conventional Li-ion equivalent.
I'm an idea man.
Yet another "developing battery" story. I think this is the 50th one I've seen this year.
I worked at a company where a hallway smelled like an open sewer for several weeks. What made it mysterious was that no sewer line went through that part of the building, leaving the building architect and plumber puzzled. The smell came from leaking batteries inside a UPS in a network closet. Since no one bothered to plugin in the monitoring cable, the one guy who did I.T. for the company didn't know that the UPS stopped working a long time ago. Now that was one hell of a stinker.
Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away.
Actually it's 40 years - and it's been 40 years away for the past 60 years or so. However batteries are a bit different in that there are regular claims of working prototypes with capacities 2-10 times the current limit and/or recharge rates similarly improved yet none ever seem to make it into a commercial product and yet the capabilities of Li-ion are slowly improving. What I would love to know is where all these ideas fail (as so many clearly have). Is that they cost too much to make, aren't safe in everyday environments or that the improvements claimed are woefully optimistic? or is if that by the time they would come to market Li-ion has improved itself to the point where there is not much difference in capability?
Even if they succeed with the batteries...
No thanks for the root kits
No thanks for the PS3 "Other OS" removal and subsequent law suit
No thanks for the MPAA
No thanks for the MPEG-LA
No thanks for the Rockstar Consortium
Boycott Sony
Hmmm... fire and brimstone....the CEO of Sony isn't a Mr. de Ville by any chance?
I predict, that most — if not all — of the added capacity will be eaten by new hardware and features, as happened with the rest of the computer-industry.
By Moore's law, today's computers ought to be over 256 more powerful, than in the previous millennium (16 years ago) — and the hardware is. But the operating systems and applications ate most of it. And not only because of the new features which the users want (as well as those we do not), but also because the programmers choose wasteful technologies like programming languages, that are more convenient for them, and otherwise sacrificing speed to software portability and maintainability.
It is quite common for people to complain, that their computer has "become slow" — they don't realize, that the machine is just as fast as when they bought it, but the software (including open-source) has become more demanding.
For similar reasons, the phones using these new batteries will not run for 40% longer...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
when they're leaking.
Lithium sulfur batteries are not new, and Sony is hardly the only company or group trying to make them work commercially. There are hundreds of projects with new battery chemistries and structures in development all around the world. One more is not news in any way whatsoever unless and until it's being produced commercially for cheap.
Well, let's hope not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Apple is working on a phone 1mm thinner than iPhone 6s, battery still lasts the same time! Some unhappy owners claim it slowly bends under its own weight.
I do not know the specific details of this battery, but it seems to imply it not only has a greater energy density but has a similar power density. Energy density is just the total energy of the battery, typically discharged at an extremely slow rate like 20 hours, divided by the volume. Power density is how fast you can discharge the battery, essentially energy per unit time, with the density also being per volume.
What will make these batteries successful is if the actual capacity at a typical discharge rate needed for these devices is better than current batteries, with similar or greater cycle lifespans, and for nearly the same cost or less cost.
Every battery "breakthrough" story follows the same pattern of failing to dish out all the important details:
Cycle Life
Shelf Life
Energy Density
Production Cost
Safety
An actual breakthrough would stress excellent results in all areas instead of a cherry picked one or two and would never end with cryptic notes about unresolved critical shortcomings.
Try using a NiCad again and you'll see what's happened with these great new battery technologies. I still have some NiCad laying around because not long ago that was the option for an affordable battery. Then nickel metal hydride came out, which was much better. Lithium ion was even better. Then lithium polymer, which was much and continues to improve.
See also lead acid, nickel acid, and half a dozen other chemistries that have been used commercially in the last 20 years. Batteries have come a long way since the Gameboy.
What's the long term strategy for storing the waste products after the lifetime of the battery? Tesla for example intends to close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears while singing lalala with waste lithium. I assume lots of big blue barrels will be leaking for 100,000 years. This type of disposal is proven to cause decreased intelligence of people living near such disposal sites. Lithium itself is recyclable, but doing so would bankrupt Tesla as opposed to just mining more.
What is the long term environmental impact of waste sulfer?
Everybody knows that Sony is the devil, small wonder that they use sulfur for their stuff.
Color me skeptical, but these "battery breakthrough" stories are the new "laptop fuel cell" stories, which have appeared here since about the first month Slashdot has existed, and always been shipping just a little bit in the future.
When they put them in a shipping product, then I'll pay attention.
"Dude, did you fart? It stinks in here! You need to cut back on your hard-boiled egg consumption."
"Relax dude. I'm just charging my phone."
I've got a solution to that problem - it's called an LG39C smart phone. It's got less then a 5inch screen so it fits in my shirt pocket easily though normally in a case. I'd rather they work harder on getting the damn thermals down even further on my phone. If that means better chip designs or some other changes other then size, I'll be damn happy.
As to being able to drive a monitor, most of the current crop of Smart Phones already have enough GPU to handle standard Aero Theme effects at full 1080 rez. Similar to how Intel Graphics were. From a business use case, good enough for work and that's what's needed.
Even gaming can be handled with a bit of work on mobile GPU's. The main thing to keep in mind is that you wont be hitting anything like 219FPS on a mobile GPU but if you're willing to accept 60FPS as the limit, you'll find many games to be quite playable.
Where we need some standardization is on USB. I'd like to see a Simply connection of flat to the computer with "D" for printers and external drives, micro for charging. Quit using the Micro connection for anything other then charging, making the cables simpler and more robust and if you need a keyboard/mouse use the f**king blue tooth system to connect to them. You can even transfer files using BT as most tablets allow that with phones, including linking the phone as a bt hotspot - prefer using them that way instead of as a Wi-Fi hotspot since it uses less power for both equipment.
A reporter wrote about inmates in a prison in California and what their lives behind bars were like, remarking that all the inmates had cell phones even though they were forbidden.
You could tell what model cell phone a prisoner had by the bar of soap they had carved into a (ahem) "keeper." You see, they stored their cell phone "where the sun doesn't shine", and the shaped bar of soap was to reserve a space for the phone. The reporter than quipped, "I pity the man with a Galaxy S4 . . ."
What I never figured out from the article was, where do they keep the charging cord?
What does a Tesla use in highway cruise? About a third of a kWHr to the mile? If an efficient constant-speed fossil fuel generator can produce 12 kWHr per gallon of gasoline equivalent, the Tesla is getting about 36 MPG? People are claiming 50 MPG average usage from a Prius?
For all of the low drag coefficient and regen braking of the Tesla, the breakthrough with that vehicle is the large capacity battery.
On the other hand, some 40 years ago I knew an engineering professor who was doing EV conversions on vans using lead-acid batteries. He was claiming that the "round trip" from the wall outlet through the rectifier to charge the battery, and then to discharge the battery through the chopper (no inverter--he was using a DC motor) to the motor was about 50 percent efficient. In other words, say he charged the battery with 10 kWHr as read from his electric meter, he was getting 5 kWHr applied to the wheels.
The Tesla lithium battery is supposed to be more efficient than the lead-acid battery in the charge-discharge cycle? But a reasonably slippery car should go, what, 65 MPH on 12 kW (or less) at the wheels? This means that a Tesla should be using below .2 kWHr/mile on the open road but that it uses more than that is evidence that their charger-battery-inverter-motor efficiency is below 60 percent, which is in line with what the professor doing EV conversions was saying?
The Prius suffers from the same round-trip problem, but by being hybrid, much of the power goes directly to the wheels. The Chevy Volt suffers more from the round-trip problem, although at high speeds there is a mode with mechanical transmission of engine power to the wheels? I am told that in highway mode beyond the range of the battery pack, the gasoline efficiency of the Volt is unimpressive, in the mid 30's.
If one percent of these survive production scale up, it will be a revolution.
Unfortunately I thnk that depreciation is far away and goes even longer when you hear that factories like Giga factory are built nowdays. But I think that when depreciation of the lithium tech comes then many new technologies will burst! But I think sulfur is the most promising technology today. I think that this technology will drive us to 5x better batteries and this what the automotive industry need to beat gasoline! Then a new era or a new industrial revolution will begin!
Let's just say that with Sonys track record I'll be waiting till the second gen of these to make sure they don't explode :)
LOL..... I hope they succeed. I also note that most of the battery innovation is coming from companies other than those that have dominated the battery market for decades. But a corporate saying "safe enough for commercial use" is inviting some funny looks. There are loads of products that came to market that weren't..... really..... Safe.
Only boring people are ever bored.